About that $6 million deal … It’s for White Center Square

Several White Center Now commenters asked questions following our publishing the other day of the King County Council’s news release announcing a $6 million financing deal for a “retail plaza … near Greenbridge.” What’s the project, and what’s “White Center Investment Fund LLC”? they asked. Alcina noted that the state corporation files include no such entity. We put the question to King County Council Chair Dow Constantine‘s office, and James Bush explains:

“White Center Investment Fund LLC” is an entity set up for this loan by U.S. Bank. It’s a Delaware limited liability corporation, as are many of the local LLCs set up for development purposes. In this sort of federal tax credit arrangement the money moves around from entity to entity, but where it will end up is as a loan to Vongs LLC, a corporation owned by the Vong family. They have an Asian grocery store in White Center which will move into a much larger space in this project when it is completed.

The White Center Square site is at SW 100th/14th SW (Google Street View, above). The project’s total cost is expected to be around $10 million. Here’s the ordinance the council passed; we had spoken with the company working on the project recently, and they said they’re hoping to break ground around the end of this month.

ADDED WEDNESDAY NIGHT: KING 5 TV news was in White Center today to do a story about the project and the area’s revitalization in general (what? no Rozella/Full Tilt interviews?); see it here.

A similar, but even larger, funding was done for The Bon Marche about ten years ago. They said that downtown Seattle was in such decay, they should get HUD money to revamp the parking lot, and remodel their building.

I think it is criminal that public money is used to fund a private venture as this. It is a strip mall. It is going to benefit the investors of that strip mall and no one else. As far as creating jobs, those are going to be minimum wage jobs. Less then 20k a year. It will take over six years before that 6 million is paid to sixty workers, and all of them will still be in poverty.

Also, it is not like White Center hoes not have enough retail space. Look at the vacant buildings on 16th.